Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A New Year: Jupiter Enters Scorpio

My wife and I have just come back from vacation, from drifting in
the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Now
we’re back to our usual routines, starting a new work week. And yet not quite. There’s always an inner change after
immersion in the sea. As we drift, we
loosen our bones, forget our worries, surrender everything to the rhythm of the
waves. It feels so necessary to do this
once in a while.

And now here we are, the same and yet different. And the year is also about to go through a
sea-change. On October 10, a new year begins, in astrological terms, as Jupiter
enters its new sign. For the next year –
until early November 2018 – Jupiter will be in the water sign Scorpio.

Scorpio is a water sign, but not a placid one, and so I’m not
seeing a particularly mellow year ahead.
This is the sign of deep water, and it relates to the powerful currents
that move us without our knowing: memory,
yearning, desire, resentment, hatred, ambition. These things spring from unseen caves in our
psyches, and run unimpeded, unrecognized.
Sometimes we feel the steam coming up from these underground caverns,
but we generally close them off quickly.
There be monsters in those unexplored depths.

This is a year when some of those monsters will come to light, one
way or another. For some people, this
will mean remembering traumas that they would just as soon forget, and
undergoing the work of healing. People
will become aware of horrible things that have been done, as these jagged
wounds are exposed to sunlight. There will
be clarity, acknowledgement, and perhaps even some level of forgiveness.

Social traumas will also be revealed for all to see, and this is
not a year when we can sweep all past atrocities under the rug and pretend that
we’ve always been noble and heroic. Nope.
No healing can happen without truth-telling.
And so this will be a year in which some naked, ugly truths move through
the community, and there will be plenty of people screaming foul, cringing, or
refusing to believe. And there will be
others who have their realities vindicated, at last.

For those who have had thorough early
training in projecting our fears outward (like our current president), Jupiter
in Scorpio will increase paranoia. Scorpio is a sign of excesses, and some people
will lose the battles with their demons.
There will be more murders and suicides than before, and this is a hard
thing to write when mass murder has already become such a common thing in our
world. And yes, some of this will be a
response to harder economic conditions.

But, in helping people open up to the truths within themselves,
this Jupiter sign can also help people understand each other. It’s not a particularly idealistic sign, but
rather one that focuses on emotional truths and basic survival. When you strip away pretenses, it all comes
down to an acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability in this rocky
world.

Jupiter in
Scorpio will also spawn its share of art. Scorpio is an imaginative, creative sign,
since all this emotional energy has to express itself somehow. And so it may be a year of large, dynamic,
explicit art work. Sexual themes could
be expressed quite overtly. Of course,
the public response to this will be mixed, and some people will feel justified
in responding violently to artistic visions that they don’t share.

There
will also be a stronger interest in the occult, and this will probably include a
real range of philosophies. There will
be more of us wiccans, focusing our energy on healing the earth, but also a
spate of demonologists conjuring up more mischievous forms. People will be looking for deeper sources of
power, and won’t be afraid to go through the curtains that separate different
realms of existence. And so there will
be more people haunted, mesmerized, transfixed by private ghosts, but there
will be also more folks working with elemental earth energy.

Other
people will reject the noisy materialism of the world entirely, and move
towards a state of Zen purity. Scorpio is
a sign of strong desires, and it can also manifest in the desire to completely renounce
desire. And on the other side of the
spectrum, there will be more sexual openness, as people look into themselves, stumble
over the body-hatred that poisoned so many of our ancestors, connect this to the
poisoning of the earth, and find ways to cauterize these wounds.

This
Jupiter sign gives a relentless need to understand, so it’s good for all kinds
of research. There can be breakthroughs
in medical research, biology, genealogy, chemistry, and atomic physics. It’s a time when people become obsessed with
solving mysteries. And it’s also good
for cleaning up cesspools in government, so we will probably see quite a bit of
public corruption come to light. Jupiter’s
entrance into Scorpio might see Trump impeached, or it might not, but I have no
doubt that a bunch of his henchmen will go down.

The
main contradiction in Scorpio i

s that it can be a quiet, reticent,
self-controlled sign, and it can also be one of volcanic reactions and dramatic
outbursts. Self-knowledge is key to
handling these intense energies. It’s
not a choice between repressing them or letting them explode like a grenade. It’s about becoming familiar with the salty
taste of your own tears, and the primal rhythms of your own happiness.